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I know. We can’t shake you guys. A month ago I actually thought the playoff teams were already set, then the As started winning.
I’m always amazed at how Oakland so often has a competitive team with no money.

At Fenway you have to saw off a finger and then also give them a liter of blood every inning and then shuffle into a completely packed ball park where your injured hand can bleed all over you eighteen dollar beer. Bringing a family there would cost you hundreds of dollars for one game.

It's sort of a catch 22. On one hand, John Henry buying the franchise is what got us the three World Series titles in the last fifteen years (though everyone here knows 2013 was a fluke and absolutely just lightning in a bottle), but on the other hand, he now seems totally content having won and is just clearly trying to keep the team sort of okay because he's making so much money.

2004 was pretty awesome though. That's my favorite sports memory of my life. It was surreal seeing them finally win.

It's not really odd, I just have more access to local sports media as anyone would in any city. So I can be more exposed to it if you weren't from here.

So as someone from Boston who's around this stuff, basically, John Henry bought the Red Sox in the early 2000s-ish (might have been like 1999 or so). He hired Theo Epstein under this other guy, Larry Lucchino. The Red Sox when I was a kid in the nineties were historically bad. My dad and all my uncles thought they'd never live to see us win a World Series because we hadn't won one since very shortly after the first world war.

The guy that bought the team, John Henry, while ridiculously wealthy (like stupid wealthy, he owns Manchester United too in the Premier League), is borderline senile and has no concept of how to handle a baseball team. Theo started building it and this is when we still had Pedro Martinez, and when they added David Ortiz, traded Nomar, etc. That was all Theo. He ended up in only a few years taking the Red Sox from a historically bad franchise to becoming the first team to come back from being down 3-0 to come back and win and to go on and sweep the World Series. We were then world beaters for years.

So that other dude, Larry Lucchino, was a fucking idiot. But he was the owner's friend and they started letting him make all of the decisions. Which is dumb, because Theo Epstein stopped the two longest droughts in baseball - he build the Sox up and took only a few years to get a World Series, then he got pissed about how they gave Lucchino all the power so he left for the Cubs, and took only a few years to end the other longest drought in baseball history. He's undoubtedly going to go down as one of, if not the best general manager of all time. Ending two almost century long World series droughts is no small thing with two extremely historic franchises.

So now we got our World Series, and it's been a fucking mess here with how they manage the team. It's constant bitching by the players because now we don't have a good GM and the extremely old owner just throws fistfuls of cash at players without actually having a strategy. David Price is making like 230 million with his contract and he's constantly flipping out on reporters. You're making more than like anyone in sports.

So it's been a huge chaotic mess here for years with a senile old rich man who totally lost control of his club house.

Dombrowski is notorious for showing up and just absolutely destroying a farm system for established players, he did it in Miami and the Tigers as well. I mean, don't get me wrong, he can put together a stacked team (Scherzer, VErlander, Miggy, VMart, Fielder etc with the Tigers), before that he was also responsible for the massive spending and farm system purge with the Marlins during the Josh Johnson era / beginning of the whole Buehrle, Reyes, era there as well. Then he'll ride off into the sunset with an owners finger in his ass with zero farm system and a 37+ year old team. The Sox will be competitive for a long time, but at some point, once they start breaking down, there's not a lot of fallback options in that system after the Sale / Kimbrel / Nunez / Moreland trade (the original one), Pomeranz, and a few others sprinkled in. He's probably banking on Intl' pool money, but iirc I think the Red Sox and Dodgers get in trouble for that shit a year or two ago, and had to forfeit a lot of money, which is why they couldn't go after Ohtani.

It's not really odd, I just have more access to local sports media as anyone would in any city. So I can be more exposed to it if you weren't from here.

So as someone from Boston who's around this stuff, basically, John Henry bought the Red Sox in the early 2000s-ish (might have been like 1999 or so). He hired Theo Epstein under this other guy, Larry Lucchino. The Red Sox when I was a kid in the nineties were historically bad. My dad and all my uncles thought they'd never live to see us win a World Series because we hadn't won one since very shortly after the first world war.

The guy that bought the team, John Henry, while ridiculously wealthy (like stupid wealthy, he owns Manchester United too in the Premier League), is borderline senile and has no concept of how to handle a baseball team. Theo started building it and this is when we still had Pedro Martinez, and when they added David Ortiz, traded Nomar, etc. That was all Theo. He ended up in only a few years taking the Red Sox from a historically bad franchise to becoming the first team to come back from being down 3-0 to come back and win and to go on and sweep the World Series. We were then world beaters for years.

So that other dude, Larry Lucchino, was a fucking idiot. But he was the owner's friend and they started letting him make all of the decisions. Which is dumb, because Theo Epstein stopped the two longest droughts in baseball - he build the Sox up and took only a few years to get a World Series, then he got pissed about how they gave Lucchino all the power so he left for the Cubs, and took only a few years to end the other longest drought in baseball history. He's undoubtedly going to go down as one of, if not the best general manager of all time. Ending two almost century long World series droughts is no small thing with two extremely historic franchises.

So now we got our World Series, and it's been a fucking mess here with how they manage the team. It's constant bitching by the players because now we don't have a good GM and the extremely old owner just throws fistfuls of cash at players without actually having a strategy. David Price is making like 230 million with his contract and he's constantly flipping out on reporters. You're making more than like anyone in sports.

So it's been a huge chaotic mess here for years with a senile old rich man who totally lost control of his club house.

Liverpool, the Glazer family (Tampa Bay Bucs family ownership) owns Manchester United and the rest is a publicly traded company ($MANU).